Asthma Frustration

My plan for today was to finish organizing, cleaning, and decorating my man cave in the basement. It all started out all fine and dandy until I lost my breath. So now I"m sitting on the couch, probably appearing to others like I normally do. They don't have it, so they don't know what it's like. And that's fine with me, I don't want them to know what it's like. 

Okay, so I'm on to treatment #2 now.  My breath has not come back. Let's see if I can explain the feeling. At rest I feel pressure in my chest. In my face I feel the inflammation.  Actually, what I feel in my chest is probably the inflammation too.  It's the allergic response in full gear. My eyes, face, throat, and airways are all inflamed.  It kind of gives me an itchy, burning feeling at rest. 

Okay, so I take in a deep breath, and it comes in all the way, although at about the 1/2 way mark it comes in slow and difficult. This is actually a good asthma attack compared to some I had as a kid when I could only take in half a breath.  However, it feels pretty crappy to say the least.  

Still, my daughter Laney plays on the floor with a ball.  She is tossing it into the air, and smiling as she does so.  My son wants me to look at the game he's playing on the Kindle.  They are completely oblivious to how miserable I feel. I like it that way. 

Interestingly, as I wrote in my post "What it's like to have asthma," my wife failed to react when I told her I was having trouble breathing. Even though I explained to her before what it's like, she doesn't have it, so she forgot. So there's no empathy from her.  In fact, she seemed to be annoyed with me. 

I'm not judging or criticizing her, it's just an observation as an asthmatic.  It's normal for her to not have empathy for me, as she has never been short of breath before, and therefore there is no way for her to even conceive of what it's like for me right now. 

Okay, treatment #3.  I do not feel any better still.  I did take a benadryl, so hopefully it will relieve some of the inflammation soon and help with my breathing.  Usually it works pretty well for asthma attacks like this that are caused by allergies. The problem is I will probably be really tired when they kick it. This will pretty much ruin the rest of my night.

My goal for tonight was to create a collage on my wall with some old baseball cards I found.  I figured that would be a fun way to end my day.  I will have to tackle that project on some other day, perhaps on a day that I didn't decide to clean up the kids dress clothes.  You know, if you have allergic asthma, you probably would be better off just leaving the family room in the basement a mess.  It's better to have a messy basement than not to be able to breath.  However, on the other hand, it does look nice.

I did say to my wife last time this happened.  I was already feeling crappy last Sunday, so I decided to clean the basement.  I became severely dyspneic, kind of like I am now. I was starting to feel panicky (although I looked as cool and calm as I am now, a talent I have), and I said to her, "Yep.  This is what happens when I do something I enjoy."

It's true.  When I do things I enjoy, I have asthma attacks. No, I'm not feeling sorry for myself.  I never feel sorry for myself.  I usually find ways to deal with it, as I'm doing now writing this. Usually these thoughts go through my head and don't get written down, so this is kind of neat for you to be reading this. But still, if you don't have it, even though you are reading this, you won't know what it's really like to have asthma.

Sorry, but if you don't have it, you cannot conceive what it's like.  You can even live with a severe asthmatic like my wife and children do, and you still will have no clue what it's like. It's more than just being short of breath. It's sitting on the couch being on treatment #3 and not one other person in the house even notices.

No one can conceive of the idea that, even if I really want to go into the basement again tonight, I will not be able to do it.  I will be stuck up here. If my wife weren't going to work tonight she'd probably think I was being lazy. Well, I'm not.  I want to do something.  I can't.  I'm stuck in a body that looks normal.  But, as you know now, I can't breathe....

Okay, I'm going for a walk outside to see if that will help.  Fresh air sometimes helps in that way... Cool and calm, my kids singing, I leave the living room...

Back.  Maybe I feel a little better.  Yeah, I must feel better.  Now I'm going through the pissed off phase.  I want to finish my project in the basement. Nope.  Can't do it. I'm gonna have to sit here on the couch until my breath comes back.  And when it does, I will not be able to go into the basement for a 3rd time today.  I can't do that again.

Neat.  My kids play on.  They have no clue how I feel.  Actually, my wife wouldn't either if I hadn't told her. That's one of the things I've learned I have to do as an asthmatic: when I feel bad I have to tell someone. I have to tell the people around me.  I have to say something, even though I feel stupid doing it, because... well, what if I did stop breathing because of my asthma. What if... It has never happened and probably never will... to me, asthma isn't something that will kill me.  It's basically just something that annoys me, and forces me to live a simple life in an allergy free environment.  If only I could avoid brave moments like today and quit going into my basement.

Of course now I'm feeling like crap and am having an adrenaline rush from all that ventolin.  You know what would be nice is if I could just poke one of my sons epi pens into my right thigh.  That would give me my breath back in , oh, about 5 minutes.  Then I'd be good as new.  But I won't do that.  I don't dare.

You know another thing that sucks is I probably shouldn't have a beer tonight, feeling like I do.  In the slim likelihood this doesn't get better and I need to go to the ER, any alcohol buzz would make the decision to go all that harder.  Plus alcohol dries out the lungs, and that could make things worse for me. However, on the other hand, the alcohol might also take away some of the feeling of air hunger I'm feeling about now.

I will report back once my breath comes back.  6:28 p.m.  I will be back.  

It appears mosquitos love asthma blood

My 1 YO baby had a large mosquito bite on her back, and so I humbly got out the bug spray and sprayed her little body to prevent any further damage. Moments later I noticed I was wheezing and a little tight.

This brought back a memory of many bug bites on my legs. I remember I used to get more than most other kids. I'd be up all night itching away, and by morning I'd have scarred up legs. Usually by the time school started in the fall I was glad there was a no shorts policy at our school.

I remember how there could be 20 people sitting around a camp fire, and all the mosquitos would be around me. Sometimes I could see a dark, swarming cloud of the little annoying pests over my head. They loved me, or at least my blood, and I hated them. I kept swatting and they kept biting. Yet I stayed outside because I was a kid, and loved the outside. I wanted to be like a normal person, and hang out where the fun was.

Yet I remember my mom and dad not allowing me to use bug spray because if I used it I usually had trouble breathing. I don't know if it was the smell or something in the spray itself. So there was actually a double edged sword per se, where if I used the spray the bugs didn't get me but I had trouble breathing. And if I didn't use it the bugs got me and I could breathe.

And it seemed that for some reason, even if no one used bug spray, the bugs just seemed to swarm around me. I don't know why this was. Perhaps they loved asthmatic blood better than normal blood.

As an adult this doesn't happen so much. Now I can use bug spray most of the time and it doesn't bother me. I suppose this could be because my air passages are larger, yet I bet it's also because modern wisdom has allowed me to obtain better asthma control.

The neat thing about my episode last night was I never had to use my rescue inhaler. I simply waited it out, and the long acting beta adrenergic I obtained from using Advair earlier in the day did the job. It's neat how that works. It never was like that in years past.

I never really thought of it when I was a kid, how much asthma effected my life. I never realized how tough of a kid I was, being willing to tough out another asthma attack just so I could be normal and hang with my relatives and friends.

The asthma never stopped me, and neither did the bugs -- bug spray or not.

My unique asthma flares

I'm having a rare asthma flare up today. The reason is because I hired someone to make a new bedroom in the basement for my son, and all the sawdust, and dust mites being spewed up through the vents is killing me.

Well, it probably doesn't help that I've been cleaning the upstairs bedrooms, but that's done now. Keep in mind I'm not as bad as I would be if I weren't on all these great new controller meds, although I can definitely notice my early warning signs:

1. Tight chest
2. Itching feeling in neck area
3. exhaustion
4. Urge to sneeze
5. Nasal congestion
6. Runny nose
7. gut feeling
8. Ventolin isn't working
9. Can smell all the allergins in the air (a unique skill I have. More on this later)

Now, I've been meaning to talk about this for a while, but my asthma is unique in that no matter how I feel my peak flows do not change. For example, I just blew into my peak flow meter, and my PEFR was 690. Keep in mind my personal best is 730, so 690 puts me right in my normal range.

In fact, as I track my peak flows, I've noted feeling mild or "undetectable" shortness of breath on days when I've blown a 650, which is in my green range, and I've noted breathing normal on mornings I've blown as low as 550, which is in my yellow range.

This was not true when I was a kid. However, as an adult, my PEFR is not representative of how I feel. In fact, back in 1998 when my asthma was so bad I could barely take in a half a breath, and ended up in the ER, and later admitted for 10 days, my PEFR was over 700 for the entire stay. Go figure that out.

The Asthma Guidelines do note, however, that both symptom monitoring and peak flow monitoring are equally effective. The only problem with symptom monitoring is it's hard to really know it's time to give up and go to the ER (No, I'm not even close to that point, but I'm just saying).

If you monitor peak flows, and you blow a 60% of your personal best (for me that would be 438 or less), then you know you better take action quick and get better, or get your lungs to the ER.

Of course, whichever method you use, it's always hard to make the decision to go to the ER. It's easier to be modest and try to treat it yourself. It was this thinking that prompted me to write "Having asthma symptoms? Here's five tips to help you decide what to do."

So, needless to say, I have to monitor my symptoms as opposed to my PEFR. Now I still continue to monitor my PEFRs in a peak flow flowsheet I created (you can link to it here) just in case, although I do tend to slack in this area.

It's for this reason I'm usually relegated to being observant to my early warning signs as a cue that I need to stop whatever I'm doing and take action. However, still, that is easier said than done, especially when you're involved in a task you're enjoying.